Demise of NorthWest Airlines
A Northwest Airlines Pacific Trip in the Deregulation Era (circa 1990)
This story goes back to around 1989–1992 or thereabouts. The goal of the trip was simple enough: get from Seoul, South Korea back home to Falls Church, Virginia. The reality of doing that in those days was something else entirely.
The trip began with getting from a hotel in Seoul to the main airport, which if my 80-year-old memory serves was called Kimpo or something similar. That alone was a bit of an ordeal. Then came the monstrous security process, which took roughly two hours.
After that came the main event: an eighteen-hour trans-Pacific flight on a Boeing 747.
The seating configuration seemed designed for people averaging around 5'2". Unfortunately I was about a foot taller than that. Sitting in one of those seats for eighteen hours was not something I could realistically picture doing.
So I spent much of the trip standing.
To make matters worse, the fellow in front of me had his seat fully reclined the entire time. There was essentially no space left for anyone behind him.
Food service was another problem. I never managed to get anything to eat on that flight. By the time we landed I had gone well over twenty hours without food.
We landed in San Francisco, where Northwest had its own terminal area that was physically isolated from the rest of the airport like a sort of airline leper colony.
The only food within walking distance was a canteen serving cold cereal and what looked suspiciously like army-style powdered scrambled eggs.
I walked over to the kiosk in the center of the place and said something like this:
"Hey, I just got here from Seoul. There was no way to eat on that airplane, and the last time I've had anything to eat was more than twenty hours ago. And all you have to eat at your canteen is cold cereal and army-style powdered eggs. Why is that?"
The fellow behind the counter replied:
"Oh, it's breakfast time."
Breakfast time — in San Francisco.
At that point I was still operating on Seoul time after a trans-Pacific flight and roughly twenty hours without food.
After a short wait I boarded the second leg of the trip: San Francisco to Minneapolis.
This leg was also on a 747, which struck me as odd since the flight clearly did not have anywhere near 400 passengers on it. A smaller aircraft would have seemed more logical.
But there it was.
The airplane looked as though it had just returned from one of Curtis LeMay’s fire-bombing runs over Tokyo. The left wing in particular had some very strange looking features.
In a few places it appeared that aluminum sheeting was simply missing.
There were patches and discolorations that gave the strong impression that someone had attempted field repairs using equipment better suited to welding steel than aluminum.
It looked, frankly, like something that might have been forced down in Borneo and patched together with spear blades by the local natives.
The takeoff gave me some very bad vibes.
Eventually I called a stewardess over and said something along these lines:
"Pardon me, miss. I'm 46 years old and I've had a reasonably good life. It wouldn't be the greatest tragedy on Earth if something happened to me. But you don't look a day over 22. Don't you think you're a bit young to die?"
She looked at me like I had three heads.
I continued:
"I would suggest that you take a good look at the left wing and the inboard engine on this aircraft and tell the pilot that this plane might be a good candidate for an inspection when — or if — we get to Minneapolis."
Her reply was immediate:
"Oh, that's probably why they're sending this plane to Minneapolis. That's where they work on the 747s."
My thought at that point was that if the airplane needed that much work, the only people on board should have been the pilot — wearing a parachute — with a clear path to the nearest exit.
The alternative would have been to cut the aircraft into pieces with torches and ship it to Minneapolis by rail.
But somehow we made it.
And that, more or less, was air travel during the deregulation era.